Word: africa
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...industry that relies on pigeonholing performers. He has had some mainstream success - you might remember the Top 40 hits Mornin' and Moonlighting (the theme from the 1980s TV series of the same name, starring Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis). He also performed on the 1985 USA for Africa charity recording We Are the World. But none of Jarreau's 20 albums or 23 singles have cracked the U.S. Top 10. "When people hear 'jazz singer,' they tend to approach with a little nervousness," he says, "because some jazz has put a bit of distance between the performer and audience...
...plants. After the war, a South African entrepreneur called "Slip" Menell bought the South African rights to Fischer-Tropsch, and in 1950 the new white supremacist Nationalist Party government formed Sasol--an acronym for Suid-Afrikaanse Steenkool en Olie (South African Coal and Oil)--to produce gasoline from South Africa's vast coal deposits...
...international sanctions began to bite in the 1970s, Sasol became integral to the survival of an isolated South Africa--and a frequent target of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) guerrillas. In 1980 the ANC's military wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe, blew up parts of Sasol's plants in Sasolburg and Secunda, both south of Johannesburg. In 1983, '84 and '85, the rebels returned to launch rocket attacks on the plants. (The rockets missed, but the attacks are commemorated to this day in an ANC song whose chorus goes, "Whoosh! Whoosh...
...Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, programs are under way that are reminiscent of China's successful use of village-based health workers--the so-called barefoot doctors--a few decades ago, but today's workers have even better health-care tools. The mother of all community health efforts is India's National Rural Health Mission. Initiated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and spearheaded by the young, dynamic Minister of Health, Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss, the program has, in just over three years, mobilized more than half a million new community health workers, each known as an ASHA--short for "accredited...
...decline of the river has had profound social and environmental consequences for the Jordan Valley. It has reduced habitats for the 500 million birds migrating each year from Europe to Africa. It is killing the Dead Sea, which, without replenishment from the Jordan, is being reduced in depth about a meter a year. And it is helping decimate Palestinian towns in the occupied West Bank--home to some of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities--which are slowly dying of thirst without access to the river or the authority to dig their own wells...